A Pound of White Flesh

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.” His latest book is Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left (Regnery Publishing).

Why isn’t anyone speaking the most obvious and most disturbing truth about what has been taking place in Ferguson? This is a lynch mob. It is unconcerned with the facts, impatient with due process, and it wants a severely injured officer who is probably the victim of a vicious criminal thug, indicted, tried and convicted or else. And the reason it wants him convicted is that he is white. This lynch mob even wants the prosecutor removed because his father was the victim of a black criminal 50 years ago.

This thuggery would be seen as classic lynch mob behavior except that it is composed mainly of blacks and its leaders include the Democrat Attorney General of the United States and the Democratic Governor the state of Missouri (on second thought this not so unusual). The mob is inflamed and abetted by an anti-white media that accepts the unfounded, actually ludicrous idea that unarmed black teens are regularly shot down in the streets by white police officers who are protected by a white supremacist power structure. As Bill O’Reilly courageously pointed out, there are approximately 12 million arrests every year in America and only 400 police shootings – and how many of these inspire criminal riots in the streets? Moreover, as O’Reilly did not mention, crime statistics show that a white person is 25 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a black person than vice versa.

What is truly remarkable about the nation’s tolerance for the new lynch mobs is that they have lasted for decades without drawing an appropriate moral disapprobation. Here are three recent cases: The destruction of the career and fortune of Paula Deen, a white supporter of President Obama, over a remark she made to her husband in private after being mugged by a black criminal twenty-five years earlier; the public lynching of three innocent Duke LaCrosse players, also led by Sharpton and Jackson, the nation’s most notorious lynch mob leaders; the rush to judgment and demand for conviction and punishment of George Zimmerman, falsely portrayed as a “white Hispanic” to make him culpable. And one could go on and on.

The truth is that American culture has been tragically warped by the political left, which fervently believes that whites are guilty before the fact and blacks are innocent even after the fact. The chief law enforcement officer of the land has shown himself to be a devotee of this creed, over and over. The racial morality play of white supremacy and black oppression is perhaps the most crucial melodrama the left lives by, and can’t give up. But conservatives are also too timid and apparently too haunted by guilts of the increasingly distant past to fight back.

All this has created an ongoing spectacle that encourages the criminal violence from blacks that we are witnessing in the streets of Ferguson, and the obscene libels that are issuing from the mouths of so-called civil rights leaders, Democratic officials and MSNBC radicals targeting white people. In truth, white people, who recently elected and re-elected the first black president, are far more put upon and victimized by black thugs like Michael Brown than they are models for the racially vicious caricatures contrived by the leftwing lobby and its lynch-happy followers.

It is time for this corrosive and destructive mythology to be challenged by more Americans than just Bill O’Reilly and (less forthrightly) the Fox network. It is time for people who think of themselves as liberals to liberate themselves from the false narratives of white culpability and black innocence and start judging people as individuals and assessing them through the facts. It’s time for Americans to return to the traditions that created this pluralistic miracle, the fairest and most equitable nation in history. It was the principles of the American founding that inspired Martin Luther King and gave birth to the Civil Rights Acts which ended racial categories and preferences in America’s institutional life until the political left and the Democratic Party started putting them back in. The emergence of a civil rights movement that behaves like a lynch mob is integrally related to the tolerance of racial arsonists like Jackson and Sharpton and to lawless, racist mobs that will only be satisfied by a pound of white flesh.